People just do not understand the scale and power of weather and several other natural events and disasters. For example, a run-of-the-mill four foot wave breaking on a beach releases the same amount of mechanical energy as a small tactical nuke. This is why some countries are working on harvesting wave energy to convert it to electricity.

Nuking a hurricane is like trying to kill everyone in northern Alaska using a single burst of machine gun fire. The destructive energy is impressive, but not so much when your target area is hundreds of miles across.

dragonchild:Nuking a hurricane is like trying to kill everyone in northern Alaska using a single burst of machine gun fire. The destructive energy is impressive, but not so much when your target area is hundreds of miles across.

As a dorky engineer, I immediately started picturing a method of cooling the gun long enough to do the deed.

The NOAA dude isn't thinking mad-science enough -- or, as a matter of public policy, isn't emphasizing the mad part enough. It's not so much that it couldn't be done as that it wouldn't be such a good idea.

In the first place, surgically disrupting a hurricane may not even be possible (complex systems, lol), and attempting to do it might easily make the storm much worse. Risky experiment. But at present we wouldn't even really know how to go about it. It'd be like a chimp flinging poop to try to stop a bulldozer from demolishing the zoo enclosure. An impressive display, perhaps, but neither elegant nor likely productive.

And in the second place, if it turns out that hurricanes can retaliate, we'd be farked.

Sure, a hurricane contains a lot of energy. A tremendous, phenomenal amount of energy even. All this energy is ordered in a specific pattern- a counter-clockwise spiral. I believe their intention is to disrupt the ordered system that the hurricane does its damage through.

So, what of it? An electric shock doesn't need to completely destroy the mass of a person's body to kill them, just disturb the ordered electrical patterns that support life. Would the shock wave of a major detonation disrupt the wind patterns and "shock" a hurricane into a "dead" chaotic jumble of moist air?